If this series could be summarised in a single message it would be: “Installers who ignore IP will lose out on a growing share of the CCTV market.”
With this in mind, the series has been designed to help installers to build their knowledge of IP, and explain the confusing buzzwords that seem to surround any computer-based technology. Each article has dealt with a specific subject area of IP over the past seven months, and we have already covered, at an introductory level, all the key areas.
In this last article we look forward to examining the trends that are rapidly changing the IP picture and how they will impact IP technology over the next few years.
The key trends are:
We will finally summarise these trends by addressing the question “What does it all mean?”
The decreasing cost of storage
The computer industry is still meeting a remarkable prediction made in a paper written in 1965, now known as Moore’s Law. The Law asserts that every 18 months or so we can get about twice as much computing power for the same price. This has indeed held true for almost 40 years, and is the fundamental price/performance trend on which the explosion of the computer industry has been based.
This has had and will continue to have an impact across all IP technology, including CCTV applications. Not only will the cost of computer chips in cameras and servers decrease, but also the cost of storage will decrease at the same time as the capacity of hard disks continues to rise. This trend has been clearly seen with DVRs since their introduction a few years ago, and will apply to IP storage too. You’ll need to remind yourself of the meaning of the storage unit ‘Terabyte’!
Increasing capacity of LANs
Most Ethernet Local Area Networks have a maximum capacity at present of 100Mbps (megabits per second). However, Fast Ethernet LANs, running at 1 Gigabit per second and above, have been available for a few years now, and their use is increasing. This increase in capacity greatly reduces the threat of LANs being swamped by CCTV image traffic.
Decreasing bandwidth requirements of IP CCTV
The bandwidth issue of IP is being addressed from both sides. As well as the increasing capacity of LANs, as described above, the bandwidth requirements are being reduced in two ways.
First, the compression technologies themselves are being developed. Article 2 (October 2002 edition) of this series described the present state of compression technologies, and there is constant development effort in the computer and networking industry to bring out new standards that will result in ever better compression results.
Second, installers and system managers will make better use of the controls that exist to segment and prioritise CCTV traffic to reduce its impact on LAN traffic levels. For example, the technology exists to multicast a CCTV signal, enabling the use of a single video feed by multiple users, greatly reducing traffic levels. The implementation of this and other traffic management techniques will become more widespread as IP knowledge and experience grows in the CCTV installer sector.
Wireless LANs
The advent of wireless LANs over recent years has brought a powerful flexibility to all IP applications. A similar approach to that used for mobile telephones – low power radio working within only a very restricted area – is being used to provide a cable-free (or, literally, wire-less) method of connecting devices using IP communication.
There are two wireless communications standards relevant to local communications. The Bluetooth standard covers Personal Interactive Devices, and is the standard used for wireless connection of a mobile phone to a headset, for example. The IEEE standards 802.11a (54Mbps) and 11b (11Mbps) apply to inter-building applications, and are the standards that most of the commercial wireless LANs use.
This technology is being adopted widely now, and wireless LANs are becoming commonplace in applications such as health care, trading floors, supermarkets, transportation and warehousing and are increasingly being used in office environ-ments. They are also being deployed in the CCTV field, and last month’s article carried the example of the use of a wireless LAN in a community CCTV system – the Goodwin Project in Hull.
Integration of all applications
Another driver for the increasing use of IP technology for future CCTV systems is the trend towards integrating all the security applications, CCTV, Access Control, and Fire, into a single system, running over the same network and under the same management.
The same arguments that have been set out in these articles for CCTV over IP are being repeated in fire systems and access control systems. The benefits that IP brings to CCTV – ease of communication way beyond the limits of a dedicated network, the management flexibility, the functional benefits of being software controlled, and the immediate and long term cost advantages of being part of the huge IT industry – all apply equally to the other technologies. The convergence of the three is an obvious result.
IP Convergence
In fact, convergence goes further than the three security applications, and is simply the continuation of a trend that can be described as “the inexorable march of IP”.
At the start IP was used only to connect computers, and the first LANs simply linked PCs together. Since then the use of IP has extended rapidly in two directions. First, the geographic widening of networks, which now of course extend around the world with the Internet. Second, the increasing number of applications carried on IP networks. A company’s LAN and WAN increasingly carries all communications traffic – voice telephony and data, plus the three applications of CCTV/Access Control/Fire.
The importance of communication and e-business to most companies is the imperative that drives all communication onto a single managed network. The IT department grows in import-ance, and the IT department mostly works with IP.
Internet addressing changes
The one blot on the horizon for the last few years has been the shortage of internet addresses. Our article on IP networks (December 2002 edition) outlined the way IP addressing works, and how there is a central authority controlling the numbering scheme.
However, as with UK telephone numbers a few years back, it has been evident that there were not enough numbers to go round to satisfy the explosive demand for new numbers (a combination of the growth of ‘traditional’ computer applications using IP, plus all the application areas such as CCTV that were migrating to IP) since the numbering system was devised 30 years ago.
As often happens in the computer industry, the limit will be moved before it is reached (although some argue that we have already run out).
The number of unique IP addresses will change from the current four billion addresses to a very big number – 340 billion billion billion billion. That should see us through for a while! This new addressing system, called IPv6 (that is, IP version 6) is beginning to be adopted by some manufacturers, and the full momentum of the roll-out is forecast to happen … in computer industry terminology, ‘real soon now’.
Increasing IP knowledge in the CCTV industry
Perhaps the most powerful force driving the take up of IP technology for CCTV applications is the growth of knowledge.
First, with the widespread educational process that is now occurring the fear of the new technology is removed, and it increasingly becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Second, as installers and users get detailed knowledge through experience of working with IP systems, new benefits, new application areas, and new working practices will further drive the take-up of IP technology.
Innovation in the market, currently manufacturer-led, will become more user-led from operating experience, and the technology will continue to mature and satisfy user requirements ever more closely.
What does all this mean?
We have described all the forces pushing in favour of IP technology without mentioning the dominant force of inertia in the industry – the huge investment in ‘legacy systems’.
There are of course a large number of analogue cameras out there, many quite recently installed, and the users will not be ripping these out tomorrow just because IP may be a better solution.
Not only will they remain, there will continue to be a strong, new (and replacement) market for analogue equipment for years to come However, many users see the value of linking their installed base of analogue cameras to an IP central device to build a ‘hybrid network’. Devices such as the DM Sprite connect through traditional cabling to analogue cameras, yet also have IP connectivity and an IP address for LAN and wider IP connection.
This is just one of the designs of a hybrid network – there are other ways of connecting analogue cameras to an IP network, based around codec devices linked to cameras to convert the analogue stream to IP.
Installers must keep up
These hybrid networks will be with us for a while as users look for the connectivity and functional benefits of IP without having to completely replace equipment that works perfectly well.
However, most of these hybrid networks will be in the security applications of CCTV; and we have said all along that IP is a solution for applications that are not traditional security systems.
So if the march of IP in existing networks will be by evolution through hybrid networks rather than overnight revolution, when will we see pure IP systems? The answer of course is that they are out there now. They are being installed in environments (as a generalisation) where there is no existing base of reasonably modern cameras and cabling, but there is an existing LAN.
The requirement in these situations can be of any scale, from placing one or a small number of network cameras onto a LAN for a simple security or surveillance task that would never have justified a full CCTV analogue network, up to the large IP camera systems exploiting an existing LAN as exemplified in the last article (February 2003 edition) by the Brussels Airport and Newport Schools systems.
So to repeat the message we started with, installers need to add IP to their range of skills to maintain their position in the market. Those who are already on this path are already winning interesting and profitable contracts.
Those who are not can already see the inevitable decline of their market, and potentially their business.
